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Here's an account written two years later, published as "Two Non-Sexist
Gay Groom Behind the Cotton Curtain." ~Couples and Careers." Edited
by Leonore Hoffman and Gloria DeSole. NYC: Modern Language Association,
1976.
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Two Grooms
Fort Valley, Georgia
Our marriage, like our courtship, has been conventional. It was
love at first sight when we met at the elevator just outside the sixth-
floor tearoom of the Atlanta YMCA. Ernest was a fashion
coordinator for a local department store, I a state college professor
from 100 miles way, deep in the peach and pecan orchards. One of us
black, the other white; both native Southerners. We commuted every
weekend for five months. Our friends were not surprised when we
decided to marry.
We would have wasted our time to send an announcement to
the local papers. Besides, the bank employees spread the word just as
effectively when we took out a joint account. Our wedding itself was
private, just the two of us and the Holy Spirit. Parents, although
loving, would not have welcomed the occasion; our priest would not
have officiated even had he been granted the Episcopal authority
which was expressly denied. Two apartment neighbors, historians,
sent a bottle of champagne; a psychologist friend dropped in earlier to
propose a toast; others sent welcoming tokens.
We unloaded the heavier gear from the car before beginning the
ceremony. Then we carried each other across the threshold into the
dining room, where the table was set with two wine glasses from
Woolworth's, one lone and lighted red candle instead of our
customary two green ones, a vase with one early narcissus, and an
open Book of Common Prayer [1928]. We read the service nervously,
its fearsome bidding and pledges. The words *woman* and *wife*
translated readily as *spouse*, *man*, *husband*, *Person*. All took
only about ten minutes.
One could be too quick to sentimentalize a few details, such as
our bed, a two-hundred-year-old four-poster built by the slave
ancestors of one of us for the free ancestors of the other. Perhaps we
were fulfilling their dream? Or Dr. King's dream...? We find day-to-
day living too difficult for us to negotiate other people's dreams: we
work at living our own dream, a dream no different from the dream of
many other couples, a dream of a home with much love to bridge our
separateness.
After the Honeymoon
Our careers have always been very important to both of us. We
came together from the beginning anticipating many of the inevitable
tensions between our rival commitments to careers and to each other.
We both had already enjoyed professional success in a variety of
occupations: our main challenge was clearly going to be whether or
not we could succeed together. One of my biggest hesitancies during
our months of courtship was my fear that I might thereby seem to
commit myself to conjugal activity as much of the time when we lived
all of our time together. Little did I realize that Ernest too enjoys
working along many days on end for 14-16 hours a day.
Ironically, earlier lessons from our oppression as relatively less
conspicuous gays served as resources for our thriving as an openly gay
couple employed behind the Cotton Curtain. Gays learn very early
that most jobs are not secure for those even suspect of being Gay.
Very early on Ernest had been fired from a civil service job when he
refused to go to bed with a male supervisor, who then had Ernest
"investigated" and "proved" gay. All of my teaching assignments have
been filled with horrifying anecdotes about various predecessors who
were fired when discovered as "queer." The effect of this clear pattern
of discrimination was the same on both of us: prepare for as many
jobs as you possibly can; never go into real debt; own mainly portable
property; be able always to land on your feet.
Before we met, Ernest had supported himself with a variety of
jobs--janitorial service, modeling, fashion coordinating, nursing. I had
worked as a lumberjack, mechanic, professor, professional actor,
waiter, writer. We both know that when push comes to shove we can
always be caterers, seamsters, peach pickers.... What is more, we
know that we would be better than most at any of these tasks. We
have simply had to be sure of this kind of mobility. Tenure is always
meaningless when one is gay. I have never expected an institution to
grant me tenure, and I have always been an excellent teacher precisely
because I am willing to take the kinds of risks that are necessary to
germinate ideas, the very kinds of risks that disqualify one with tenure
committees.
This is not to deny the anxiety that accompanies threats to any
job security, and certainly not to support those threats, but merely to
put those threats into a perspective where we have been able to
negotiate them reasonably successfully with, more important than any
one job, our integrity preserved. Humor has been a saving factor
repeatedly. When Ernest went to apply for beauty school, for
example, the white ladies who ran the place were terrified at the idea
of having a black male there, assuming that his only motive would be
sexual assault. When he sensed their fear, he explained to them that
he is married to another man, and they took him with open arms.
Imagine the response that came after a bishop from the
Anglican Orthodox church had written to the local paper saying that
the two of us by organizing a national group of gay Episcopalians had
been responsible for the devastating tornado that had recently struck
Fort Valley with a tornado that left the two of us and our property
unharmed but knocked the steeple off every homophobic church in
the white community. "Would one expect God to keep silent when
homosexuals are tolerated?" the bishop asked. That evening in a
spate of hate calls one familiar voice rang: "Louie, you and Ernest get
yourselves on over here and kiss in my backyard some greens will
grow!" An administrator at the college also called to suggest that I
apply for head of agriculture: power to control the wind and the rain
is queer power indeed.
Professional paranoia is an occupational necessity for open gays.
Right now I have in litigation a complaint against a major American
university [pun intended] where I was denied employment by a
homophobic dean after my winning the unanimous support not only of
a search committee of faculty and students but also of the entire
thirty-six members of the college's Faculty Rank and Tenure
Committee. Damaging evidence is still being sent to me by the
members of that Committee, who are irate that the dean violated due
process and hired a candidate who had received absolutely not
support. More typically, job applications for advertised positions
never receive answers at all.
We have been no freer from domestic harassment. In August
1975, after a year of investigation, HUD found our complaint true
that a local realtor had discriminated against us in housing because he
considered us to be criminals. Still HUD had no enforcement powers;
the realtor refused to conciliate; and no lawyer would take the case
for contingency fees, knowing, as one lawyer said, "the predictable
response of the juries in this part of the country." Meanwhile, in the
white lower middleclass neighborhood where we live, nightly as I jog I
am spat upon and verbally reviled by the 8-, 10-, and 12-year-old
children on bicycles, as their parents sit on their porches relishing
their vain hopes that thereby their children will not grow up to be
queer. Night after night, as Ernest has returned from cosmetology
classes, he has feasted on their verbal ingenuity, purposely taking up
to ten minutes just to get his kit out of the car. There would be no
help in protest. The police would only arrest us for "child
molestation" or "contributing to the delinquency of a minor." The
local Baptist preacher has already sent us a copy of a letter which he
sent to the sheriff urging investigation.
Our friends here for a long time wondered why we do not at
least keep a lower profile by not mentioning our relationship. It is
important to Ernest and me that our relationship is public. we are not
merely a sexual union, but in a complex coupling that integrates all
our life together. Whether we are entertaining or being entertained,
even when we are just shopping at the local Piggly Wiggly, it is
important for us to know that we know that they know. We can even
sometimes get into enjoying their games with knowing, as when the
employees all dash behind the butchers' one-way mirror to watch us
wink at them when we pass. As Ernest puts it, "Honey, you may gloat,
but we're the stars!"
White men have been having sex with black men in the South
since 1619, yet such homosexuality has always been related negatively
to straight institutions and defined as adultery, fornication, or sodomy.
Our open marriage obviates these definitions. The effect is
sometimes to move friends and neighbors into a new state of
consciousness. Barely if ever before on my almost all-black campus
has a dude proudly and publicly sported his white male spouse; rarely
if ever before has a white man in Georgia proudly notified his family,
prep school, even his chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution,
of his happy marriage to a black man. If the profile is memorable, far
more important is the seriousness we ourselves have experienced in
this bonding.
Some of our friends elsewhere have accused us of masochism,
saying that we ought to leave as soon as we get employment that is as
challenging and fulfilling as that we now have, but no place is clearly
enough a haven for gay persons to justify our leaving at a cut in pay or
our taking jobs that we would not find fulfilling. It may very well be
an indictment of the so-call liberal white American universities that
they leave to a small, struggling, rural black college the admittedly
difficult tasks of adjusting to an outspoken gay scholar. Interestingly,
the same persons who accuse us of masochism frequently control or at
least influence jobs to which we might flee. At times it is difficult to
stifle the bitter awareness of the eloquence with which they would
write of our being lynched.
Our economic resources have been diverse, including Ernest's
earnings from nursing and then from various student employments
while studying cosmetology, including his unemployment checks for
which he qualifies only because the state refuses to recognize our
marriage, and including my salary as an associate professor, which
remains conspicuously below that of unpublished but nongay
colleagues of the same rank, as revealed in the Georgia state auditor's
annual report. Speculations are legion as to why I have not been
fired. I prefer to thing that it is because I am lucky enough to have a
chairperson who knows that I am a good teacher. She feels that
none of my life, public or private, is of any concern to her unless it
relates directly and immediately to my function on my job. Bosses
higher up are more mixed. One official called me in almost
immediately after my serving notice to students and officials that I am
gay; he said that he respected my courage. So did the chairpersons of
at least two other departments. One very prissy boss, however, is
threatened and brings visitors periodically to tut outside my office....
[my copy of the original publication is blurred here. lc] When Ernest
similarly refused to the work of an orderly while having the rank of an
LPN, the hospital employer called him "uppity." When he tried to
organize the black aides to demand rights being denied them, they
balked in fear and the hospital fired him.
One of the lowest point in our marriage was an occasion when I
asked Ernest, "If you get that job with the cosmetics firm in NYC, can
I live off your earnings so I won't have to stay here in Georgia the rest
of this year?" HE did not answer. I waited out the long silence almost
half a day, and then he said, "Did I ask you could I `live off your
earnings' when I moved here from Atlanta without a job first? I had
momentarily lapsed from the more pervasive economy that our
marriage effects. Were we autonomous, at each trysting we would
come at each other unequally. I would be the wealthier, Ernest the
younger; I the more experienced, Ernest the more spontaneous.... In
marriage everything is given once and for all. For us marriage ended
trading and introduced sharing. The money is __ours__. The youth is
__ours__. The sponteneity is __ours__. And whatever is exhausted or
whatever is incremented is __ours__.
We find the marriage changes in kind the range of our personal
and material security. Expressed negatively, Ernest gave up his
fashion training in Atlanta to become a low-paid LPN in a rural
hospital; I gave up a Fulbright to Turkey, where he would have no
chances of employment. Ernest gave up his LPN so that we could be
together for my summer as an NEH fellow at Berkeley. I took on our
full support for several months while he was in school.... But the
negative way of viewing our material existence ignores what we
gained. By such __choices__ (we do not even call them
__sacrifices__), we have effected the very possibility of working
together. Both careers give and take from a union that is richer than
either career or than any of our possible independencies. At least we
perceive ourselves richer, and as Geraldine says, "What you see is
what you get!"
Although we are not likely to be altogether free of them
ourselves, we find that many heterosexist ways of merely asking
questions about relationships create problems for the relationships.
"Who makes the money?" "Who spends the money?" "Who owns the
car?" "Who owns the fur coat?" "Who owns the motorcycle?" "Who
pays the rent?" "Who does the dirty work?" __We do__ is our answer
to all these questions.
My own neurotic compulsions with these middleclass
perceptions have frequently inhibited my full enjoyment of our
marriage. While I enjoy cooking, sewing, and more limitedly, keeping
house, more and more my writing and my organizing activities have
preempted the major portions of my energy. Ernest is a better cook, a
much more efficient housekeeper, and an expert shopper. Once I
came home late on a rainy night to find all the washed wet clothes in
the refrigerator. "What on earth!" I exclaimed. "Lord, chile, you sure
be white tonight," he laughed; "I can tell your mama never took in
washing. It's the way to avert the mildew."
My learning to enjoy my man's househusbandliness as much as I
enjoy my own is in many ways parallel to our enjoying all parts of each
other's anatomy. The first question most gay friends ask us is, "Which
of you is the husband? Which the wife?" We honestly have no way to
answer respecting this dichotomy. We are not thus differentiated.
We both like gentle perfumes, and we both like poignant funkiness;
be both enjoy our gracefulness as well as our toughness.
We are not mirror images, however. Our careers are different
and we do not compete. We make no special demands about
productivity, but we are both aware that a marriage is dead when
either fails to want to contribute. Ernest respects the summers I
spend not making a dime but writing away as if I'll not have another
such season. I respect his taking off a year to go to school or his
taking off time to do hair of women in the state mental hospital.
We also easily resist unhealthy veneration of each other. He is
wisely suspicious of much of the pomposity of the academic
community and I of much of the vanity of the cosmetic industry. Each
of us i mature enough in his own career not to need much
reinforcement, at times even to require welcome deflation. I doubt
that the two of us could thrive very long together if we did not know
that we finitely can "make it" apart. We are committed to a
relationship precisely because it is "unnecessary." Of course, in a
temporal sphere that we __choose__ to cohabit we do __need__ each
other and we are able to be vulnerable, but we are careful never to
require a longer rope than can pull each back to his own boat and
anchorage. We are not drowning men clawing at a lifeguard, as seems
to be the model fashionable in much nongay media these days.
At the risk of being still more invidious, I suspect that of the
many nongay couples who break up, many break up because society's
alleged supports of heterosexual relationships are falsely advertised
and hypocritical. After the honeymoon is over, once the careers pull
at each other, once Jan and John realize that their parents might even
expect them to divorce, that their priest has divorced, that their
friends and neighbors are too busy with their own relationships to care
(except possibly for the value of self-congratulation that attends
efforts to seem to care), non-gays choose to walk away from each
other in bewilderment, or to remain together only by law. Gay
relationships may be paradoxically blessed by not having the change
even to expect such support systems.
Ernest and I wrote our divorce contract at the outset: each
would take half. We made our wills to structure property guarantees.
We both own together all that each makes. We have had to make our
own structures, knowing that major efforts would be exerted to deny
even those plans. We have instructions about funerals, burials, etc.
We have had some few but very significant resources in our
community, namely, in our friends. We are both gregarious and
affable, and we are invited to many parties. Often he is the only black
or I the only white present, so segregated are the others in our
community. We are made dancers, and always do courtesies of
dancing with our hosts' spouses. Maybe some index of our integration
is the fact that only one couple has ever said that we should feel
comfortable to dance together at their parties, and even there the
other guests do not have an ambience about them that would make us
feel comfortable doing so. Also, our gay friends would be much too
vulnerable for us to invite to gay parties any of our nongay friends.
In many ways we did not even anticipate, our coupling is itself
our career, so much does it alter our professional expectations, our
job security, our work climate, etc. Everyone knows that gay folks are
reasonable harmless if we remain at the baths, the bars, the adult
movie houses, the tearooms, and other such restricted areas. Ernest
could have met a new Louie and I a new Ernest every night at the
Atlanta YMCA for decades, and no one much would have bothered.
Possibly a Tennessee Williams might have celebrated our waste, or
maybe even a Proust. Certainly my priest would not have shouted, as
he did recently, that we are "making a mockery of Christian marriage
and the home." Then my bishop would never have written, as he did
this week, "I am weary of almost constant pressure applied on this
office by a movement which I do not fully understand, but which I
wish to grow in understanding"--this while virtually telling me,
probably his only regular gay correspondent, that I persecute him
merely by calling attention to my needs and the needs of my people.
Were Ernest and I still just tricking furtively at the YMCA, my
students would see me as they used to, as the linguist, the rhetorician,
the literary critic, the poet, the jogger--and not, as so often now,
merely as "that smart sissy." It is only when we couple openly that the
heterosexist culture marshals its forces against us.
The bonding we share has made us take greater risks in thought
and action. As open gays actively fighting a very hostile environment
precisely because of our sexual orientation, we have at home the
quiet strong security of our love always attesting to the rightness of
our public claims and countering the wrong attitudes about us that
even we might otherwise find hard to resist. It has been impossible
for us to doubt the beauty and the holiness of gay love in general
when morning, noon, and night we have known the beauty of our gay
love in particular. In the past I somewhat tentatively fought from the
closet for gay rights for others to be happier than I had ever been or
expected ever to be: today I would fight openly to the end just for the
two of us to be as happy as we are. Paradoxically, with "community"
thus strongly narrowed to just the two of us, I simultaneously feel
much more fully a part of the struggle of all gay sisters and brothers
everywhere and for all times.
-----
The first four paragraphs appeared in __Integrity: Gay Episcopal
Forum__ (March 1975), p. 11. __Harper's__ accepted them for
"Wraparound" but never published them.